An Angler at Large/Chapter 19
Mutual confidence being the foundation of society, we look askance at the liar as at an enemy of the human race. There is, moreover, no pleasure in lying for its own sake. A lie that takes nobody in becomes to its inventor "a dead sea fruit that turns to ashes on the lips." If he be not rewarded by the open-eyed admiration of his audience he had better have remained silent—yea, though he has lied like Ananias. For these two reasons we all wish to be believed, and it is a pitiful circumstance that the more untruthful we are the greater is our hunger for credence. The unimaginative man, who has nothing worth telling, need not and does not concern himself about the acceptance of his paltry stories. But the genius who has struck out a first-rate figment is touched in his being if the child of his fancy fails to make good.
Among anglers, therefore, a convention exists that everything shall be believed. In communities where all men go armed courtesy and toleration flourish, because no one knows what widespread carnage may result from one over-hasty pistol-shot. So fishermen, when they exchange their experiences, are careful to raise no eyebrow, to utter no dubious cough, lest the gentleness which characterises the craft should suddenly give place to wrath and contention. As of the whole, so of the part. Mutual confidence is the foundation of our society. We proceed upon the principle of "a lie for a lie and an untruth for an untruth," all goes swimmingly, and harmony prevails.
I can never understand why anybody should have wished to improve upon this admirable state of things. Yet, at one time or another, some angler must have found it unsatisfying. He was probably a fisherman of so prodigious a talent that he found that he had achieved the impossible by stretching too far the forbearance of his friends. And so, to bolster up his position amongst them, he went away and made a trophy. Armed with some distorted effigy of a 10-lb. trout, he returned to their midst and laid it before them in silence—the proud, hurt silence of the deeply-wronged man. Instead of tearing the traitor in pieces and pulverising his cast, burning the fragments and sowing the barren seashore with the ashes, they gazed dumbly upon this proof of his veracity, bowed low before him, and departed severally in search of plaster-of-Paris. A new era had dawned for anglers. Since that day in order to be a great fisherman it has been necessary to hang great casts on the wall.
Now if a man shows me a fish—a large dead fish—which he takes from his creel at the end of the day, I am prepared to hold it a convincing proof of his skill. I do not know how he came by it. I do not know if it was caught on a dry olive or with a worm or with a stroke-hall, whatever that may be. He may have bought it from a boy. He may have charmed it out to him on the bank with the music of the flageolet for all I care. I do not ask these things. He has a fish. I can handle it and recognise it for a fish by its touch and its appearance and its fishy smell, or, if it be a grayling, by its delicious odour of wild thyme. I am content. If his fish is bigger than any of mine, I tell him of one much bigger than his which broke me just after I began in the morning, when my gut was not thoroughly soaked. Yet I own frankly that he is an angler and I take off my hat to him.
But a plaster cast is a different affair. On its evidence I would rather hang its owner than yield him a tittle of respect. A plaster cast represents to me nothing but so much coin expended. If I had enough money I could have a cast as big as the whale that swallowed Jonah. And I would. If the house did not contain it, it should stand in the garden and I would paint it once every three years with not less than three coats of good and substantial oil colour.
It was one of the greatest living anglers who unwittingly opened my eyes to the fact that these things are impostures. Wishing to impress me with a proper understanding of his supremacy and the length of time he had enjoyed it, he once told me that the trophies of Thames jack which he had collected during his residence at Oxford—at Oxford, mark you, when he was a mere boy—were so large that he could not afford to take them down with him. He wished me, I believe, to infer from this that the loss of his unique collection was of less moment to him, the skilful angler, than was the cost of its freight to Paddington to him, the undergraduate, with many calls upon his purse. But I gathered more from his abandonment of these trophies than he perhaps intended me to do. It is obvious that they were so big that they could not be taken out of his lodgings without injury to the house, and that the ground landlord obtained an injunction against their removal as being parcel of the freehold. To this inference a corollary attaches. As they could not be taken out they were never brought in. In other words, they were made on the premises, and point to their creator's inordinate passion for fame a great deal more surely than to his success with the rod.
If a man should go into a court of law and swear that such and such a thing happened at half-past one by his watch, and should produce the very watch in proof of his statement, he would surely advance his case very little. Yet I have seen men stand in front of the counterfeit presentment of a trout so vast that, in the good old days before trophies were introduced, not a man among us would have dared to whisper its alleged weight—and swallow it, glass case and inscription, without an effort.
But the most pernicious feature of the trophy remains to be exposed. Unless an angler has casts to show he is looked upon with suspicion. I may expend treasures of ingenuity in adorning the relation of my exploits, but in the presence of my bare walls, my friends say, "We see that you do not care to have your fish set up. Some people don't." There are persons, of course, who cut their fish out of brown paper, and for some years after this method of angling was discovered it enjoyed a considerable popularity among the indigent. But for one reason or another—a brown-paper shape is not convincing. The most credulous eye sees through it. I suppose it is too easy to make, brown paper is too cheap; the thing has been overdone. Besides, it does not look at all like a fish. It has not the glass eye of the cast. It is flat, and though you colour it in chalk, it can never compete with the modelling and paint of the more expensive kind of trophy. No, one looks down one's nose, now, at brown-paper fishes. They are thoroughly discredited. The worst angler dare no longer hope for help from them. I have not made one for years. As in every walk of life, there is in angling one law for the rich and another for the poor. It is very hard.